1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a process for secure and timed delivery of recallable and erasable email without the need for any modification to the sender's or receiver's computers other than a change of the sender's mail transport agent (MTA). This system allows the sender to control how long the e-mail is available for viewing and the number of times that the e-mail can be viewed. The present invention further allows the sender of an email to access a listing of all active e-mails that he has sent and allows the sender to then delete or edit his e-mails after he has sent them, including deleting or adding new attachments to those e-mails.
2. Description of the Related Art
Referring to FIG. 1, the standard email transmission process which is currently available to users is illustrated, as denoted by numeral 100. The currently available email transmission process 100 starts in FIG. 1 with the start box 102 and then involves a sender using his mail user agent (MUA), i.e. generally a program such as Outlook or Eudora that is installed on the sender's computer, to create and then send an email to the sender's mail transport agent (MTA), as illustrated in box 104. The sender's MTA accepts the email from its sender and then uses simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) to transfer or send the e-mail to the recipient's MTA, as illustrated in box 106. As shown in box 108, the recipient's MTA accepts the email from the sender's MTA on behalf of its local user, i.e. the recipient, and then stores the e-mail awaiting a request from the recipient for his emails. As shown in box 110, the recipient's MUA requests email from the recipient's MTA and receives email that was stored on his MTA. As shown by box 112, the process ends at this point.
Under this system of e-mail transmission, an e-mail is transferred from the sender to the recipient in whole. The recipient has an exact copy of the entire e-mail and any attachments or documents added to the email. The sender has no control over the email from the time he delivers his email to his MTA, including no control over the storage or subsequent distribution of the email by the recipient.
One problem with the current method of sending e-mails is that once the e-mail is sent, the sender has no control over the number of times and the number of people who can receive a copy of his e-mail. This unlimited distribution can has some very embarrassing and disastrous consequences, depending on the type of information contained in the e-mail and the routing of that information. The present invention addresses this problem by allowing the sender to designate both a time limit for the availability of his e-mails and also set up a numerical limit for the number of times that his e-mail can be viewed.
Another problem with this current method of sending e-mails is that the sender can not insure that his transmissions are secure. Generally, the transmission of the e-mail to the sender's MTA is not done via a secure transmission. Although this portion of the transmission could be made secure from the sender's end of the transmission, in practice it rarely is. On the other hand, once the receiver's MTA has received the e-mail, the sender has no control over the security of the transmission from the receiver's MTA to the receiver. Although the transmission of the e-mail from the receiver's MTA to the receiver could be made secure from the receiver's end, it rarely is made so. At any rate, the sender never has any control over the security of this receiver's end or portion of transmission of his e-mails. The present invention addresses this problem by providing a method and system that allows a sender to insure that all of his e-mails are sent via secure transmission, and this is done without the need for any modification to either the sender's or receiver's computers or to the software contained on those computers. The only thing that a sender must do is to change to a new Modified MTA that employs the present invention, as will be more fully explained hereafter.
Still another problem with the current method of sending e-mails is that once the e-mail is sent, the sender is powerless to modify or delete his previously transmitted e-mails or any associated files attachments to those e-mails. The present invention addresses this problem by providing the sender access to a status listing of all active e-mails that he has sent and the ability to delete or edit his e-mails after he has sent them, including the ability to delete attachments or add new attachments to the e-mails.
Still a further problem with the current method of sending emails is that the server for the sender's MTA, and possibly the recipient's MTA, can be overloaded with the current method of email transmission when a sender is sending an email with a large attachment to a large number of recipients. Because the attached document is very large, it takes up a large amount of space on the sender's MTA server. When multiple recipients are copied on the email, this multiplies the amount of space required by the sender's MTA server. Although most MTAs set an upper limit on their systems for the size of email they will accept, if an email and its attachment are not so large as to cause the sender's MTA system to reject the email, then the sender's MTA server will accept as individual emails the original email and attachment for each of the multiple recipients. This large space requirement can overload the sender's MTA server and can result in the sender's MTA server crashing. Likewise, if several of the recipients of that large e-mail and attachment employ the same MTA, then the server for recipients' MTA can likewise be overloaded by the multiple e-mail transmissions and crash.
The present invention addresses this problem by providing a modified sender's MTA that receives e-mails and their large attachments and preprocesses them as one file regardless of the number of recipients that are to be copied on the e-mail, thereby eliminating the potential for a large attachment from overloading the capacity of the servers for both the sender's and the receiver's MTA. This results in a more reliable and less vulnerable email system for everyone involved.
An additional problem with the current method of sending emails is that when a recipient opens his mail, all of the attachments to his incoming emails are automatically loaded onto his computer along with his emails. If there is a large attachment, this can greatly increase the download time and can even exceed the capacity of a computer with less storage capacity, such as a lap top computer. Also, if the attachment is a virus, the recipient's computer can be infected by the automatically downloaded attachment.
The present invention addresses this problem by allowing the recipient control over whether he receives an attachment on his computer. Employing the present invention where the content and any attachments are maintained on the HTTP S server, the recipient does not store a copy of the email or attachments automatically. The recipient only receives an attachment if he requests it. Attachments are not automatically downloaded.